Report

It’s still pitch black when our alarms go off – 4.15am to be exact. Despite the early morning start, it’s easy to offset my drowsy, zombie-like mind with the sheer excitement of what’s on the agenda for today. While our time in New South Wales’ premier wine region, Hunter Valley, had so far consisted of eating and drinking our way around the picturesque rural countryside, I was saving my sober state of mind for our much-anticipated sunrise hot air balloon ride. While my first knowledge on the existence of hot air balloons came from the cover of my grandmother’s edition...

Creative, crafty and clever, we catch up with the duo behind Monmouth Glass Studio and get familiar with the incredible process that is glassblowing. How long have you been blowing glass? Isaac Katzoff: 18 years. Stephen Bradbourne: 25 years. How did Monmouth come about? IK: We got a commission for a big lighting job and decided we should create a business around it. Our name is the name of the street our studio is on. We liked the sound of the name plus it would give people a clue to our location, which is kind of tucked away down a...

Another week, another drug bust, another contaminated home. It seems like every other day we’re getting these headlines. But what are we as a country doing about it? And are we brave enough to take extraordinary steps to minimise drug abuse in Aotearoa? As this report comes together, I flick to my homepage and a headline appears for a haul of 900 kilograms of meth that’s been discovered in a shipping container in Melbourne. It has an estimated value of $977 million. It’s the biggest catch in Australian history, and numbers are thrown around the same as might be used...

Free Willy vs Jaws… who wins? Hollywood has altered our expectations about how this sort of apex predator duel would go down. Unless you spend more time watching documentaries than old movies on VHS, then the answer isn’t so clear. The biggest great white sharks can measure six metres long, weigh more than 2200 kilograms and have a biting power of 1800 kilograms per square inch. The biggest orca, on the other hand, was measured at 9.75 metres and weighed 10,000 kilograms. Perhaps most importantly, orcas are smart. Real smart. Let’s just say, if Willy surgically removed Jesse’s liver, then the...

For a man that is far more comfortable talking about his team than himself, Cameron Death has a work history that would make even the most charismatic tech guru weep into their kale smoothie. After almost a decade at the headquarters of the company that built the foundation of the tech revolution, Microsoft, he crossed over to the next frontier and built from the ground up NBC’s very first digital studio. His US achievements have been lauded by The New York Times, TV Week and Advertising Age, to name but a few. But while his accent and his CV have...

Annually, the World Press Photo Foundation recognises photographers’ visual creativity and commitment to in-depth photojournalism by exhibiting pictures that capture an event or issue of great journalistic importance in the previous 12 months. This year, an intense and haunting depiction of the assassination of Turkey’s Russian ambassador took the prestigious first prize as Photo of the Year. Captured seconds after the assassination, it shows Mevlüt Mert Altıntaş, a 22-year-old off-duty police officer, standing next to the lifeless body, with one finger pointing defiantly in the air while gripping onto his weapon. Altıntaş wounded three other people before being killed by...